July 2008 Archives

I am back in Hawaii after a very full weekend at Podcamp Ohio. I have a pile of news to cover tonight and some contest intros to play.

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Apparently if you use the Citibank ATMs at the local 7-Elevens in New York, you may want to change your Personal Identification Number. A security hole was exploited by 3 individuals who took over 2 Million dollars in a 5 month period.They are now facing federal charges for the crime.

The theives connected to the back end computer where they collected the PIN numbers as they were being transmitted. What is worse is it seems that these ATM's - which use Windows software - don't encrypt the PIN numbers when sent, so it's easy to intercept.

Now don't blame Windows for the error: a PIN number should be encrypted before sent and it seems these machines sent these numbers without. This is an oversight that will most likely be corrected and checked for in any ATM in the future.

Still, it does raise concern over how an ATM operates. I can easily purchase and set up an ATM machine in any location to make some money. If you watch CSI, you might remember the episode where Nick Stokes uncovers a card skimming operation - an overlay to the card reader and a small camera to watch the PIN being entered.

This, however, is something scarier because all the thief has to do is intercept the signal from ATM to bank. Some ATM's still run over phone lines. All you need is a recording device hooked up to a tapped line and you could get the card number and PIN of whoever uses the machine.

Something to think about when you make your next transaction. Most importantly, its more reason to watch closely to what your account activity is. You never know when someone else is watching it, too.

July is the month the folks over at Sprint have implemented Bandwidth Caps on their wireless data plans. Over the past 6 months I have averaged between 4 & 9 gigs of usage. So for the first time ever I have had to change the way I used the Internet.

This really pisses me off in a big way.  It’s the sign of the times really. But because they have decided to go down this road why not offer me a way to pay for a higher level of service. Come on Sprint I have been a faithful user of the service for three years and I need more bandwidth.

I cannot afford to be cut off from the world when I hit my 5GB limit. That would anger me even more and if I get canceled or they block my access because I break their 5gb cap then I am going to expect to be compensated for lost business etc..

A company just cannot start our offering a service with no published cap then change horses mid-stream and implement a policy that is ridiculous in the first place.

As a side note my mom lives in a rural area with only dial up. But Sprint does have Rev A EVDO service in her area. She was going to switch to Sprint for her Internet service but with a 5Gb cap in place we have had to rethink that. Once again a company thinking way to small is hurt by stupid decisions.

Last week I was given access to GotoMeeting Version 4.0 which will be released next week.  I have been using GotoMeeting for 3 years as part of their sponsorship of my podcast so would consider myself an expert user.  I was blown away by what they have brought to the table with Version 4.

Since I have been using the application I have really wanted two additional features  The first was native Mac Support and internal VOIP support to eliminate the need to use a third part phone service for conference calls during online meetings.

Well the folks at Citrix have hit a homerun. In GotoMeeting Version 4 the application has a native Mac edition. It is not some cheesy adaptation it looks and feels like a Mac program. The feature sets between PC and Mac are exactly the same which now allows Mac users to lead meetings and no longer just observe.

The second major feature introduced into the new version is native VOIP support. During the briefing I simply put on my headset choose VOIP for the connection and was able to participate in the meeting and chat about the new features as if I was on a land line.

Since that time I have tested the VOIP feature with 26 people in the online meeting. The reception was clear and the ability to mute noisy participants was very easy. The interface has been cleaned up and while the core tools remain the whole online meeting pipeline from start to finish with the VOIP support makes the user experience much more rewarding.

GotoMeeting Version 4 is an explosive leap forward. With raising gas prices and the economy slowing the need to save money the application continues to be well poised for business owners to save huge amounts of money on travel each month by no longer needing to leave ones desk.

While GotoMeeting is a sponsor here let me be clear this is a product I use daily.  I completely endorse GotoMeeting and am quite passionate about the product. When a product simply works each and every time I use it there is nothing more one can really say.

The new version is not available till next week but you can get a free trial at www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts and it will update automatically when the new version is released.

Disclaimer: GotoMeeting is a Sponsor of Geek News Central Podcast while no promise of a favorable review has been promised. I am a big fan of the product.

Once again this year I will be attending the New Media Expo. This is the premier podcasting event of the year. I look forward to meeting with podcasters, listeners and media buyers.

My team from RawVoice will also be at the event, manning a booth.  We have some exciting things to share and best of all we will be giving away entrance and drink tickets to the Expo Party of the year.

If you would like to schedule a private meeting with me drop me a line at geeknews@gmail.com

It has been tender central at the day job recently with the sales teams answering multiple tenders from corporate and government clients. It has meant long hours and frustration for everyone with the promise of extra business if we win. Statistics suggests that we will win 1 in 3. Over my time in IT I have seen hundreds of tenders come and go and I wonder why companies bother with the process. The decision process for a critical business system is so complex that trying to define it in a requirements document is unrealistic, and generally limiting.

Every now and then I see a company that is smart and puts out a very simple request that states what the outcome they want is and describes the existing environment. Rather than try and build complex tenders that try and cover every possible contingency and question that might come up they allow the vendors the freedom to come up with their own solution to the problem. In the end isn't that what you want from your vendor? If you know how to do things better than them you would do it yourself.

I would struggle to list a single complex tender that I have seen that has delivered a better or cheaper result than could have been gained by making the decision another way.

I am a big web user. I get on my website and write or podcast everyday. I get most of my information through many places. I Twitter and Plurk and Pownce and many other social keywords.

Today I am in the car dealership getting maintainence on my car. The process was going to take 3 hours to do, so I asked if they had Wifi. They said yes, and so I made plans just to work from the dealership.

I got connected and opened up the usual stuff (web browser, twhril for twitter, friendfeed). I entered a code and got a "You are logged in for 1 hour" from Websense Enterprise. That is all well and good however when I tried to get to some of my social network sites, I kept getting the block message: "The Websense category 'Social Networking and Personal Sites' is filtered.".

Now for most, this is not a big deal. However for me, I live my life on Social Networking. I use it to find tech information and new articles, and even contact friends to get quotes from them. With this being blocked, it really is like I am working without a limb.

MySpace and Facebook is blocked which is not a big deal. Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Jaiku and Tumblr is blocked. Fark and Digg are blocked. What is worse is I cannot get to some of my email like Yahoo and personal. Thank goodness the Gmail account is still going.

What is worse is that when I go to pages like Cnet, this connection blocks the CSS. Why? I understand with email disable the CSS and scripts so malware doesn't get in. I am searching through many sites and it it's not being blocked for filtering, the CSS-less page is making it difficult to read news.

This makes me wonder if they connect their wifi to their network and the filter is to protect the corporate computers from malware and connection bandwidth. Maybe they have an employee issue connecting up to the free wifi and checking their email?

No matter the reason, I have lost a lot of functionality and pretty much don't have my usual resources. I understand in blocking certain sites, however these sites are not porn or questionable material. They are so I can get information to turn around and report it to you. When it comes to the dealership, I am glad they offer Wifi, but I don't think it should be this limited.

If they have this Wifi connection on their main network, they have to move it off. If they have an employee issue, they should deal with it. They shouldn't block me. We don't have bandwidth caps and I'm not trying to run illegal business through their connection. It really concerns me when I cannot get into a simple page like Cnet properly.

Good thing I don't need to VPN into a system or check important information on what they consider a questionable site. Thank goodness I could get to this interface to report about it.... ;)

I have seen several articles out today regarding the slowing of adoption of broadband in the U.S. I find the theory that sales are "stalling" to be a bit suspect.

I, through the grace of some miracle, have high-end DSL (6-8 down, 3-5 up) in my semi-rural location. A friend who lives in the heart of the Big City near me can only get the lowest end DSL in her neighborhood, despite the fact that there is a substation less than a mile from her home. She would love to have higher speed, but the infrastructure isn't there for it. My mother has complained for years about dialup; she lives in a semi-rural area as well and can't stay online long enough to check mail most of the time. Yesterday, I took her to the local AT&T store and got her set up with 3G broadband wireless for her laptop. She is thrilled and I've gotten a couple dozen emails from her in the last 24 hours.

My dad can get DSL, but neither of my brothers can. Both of them are in semi-rural areas, and one is using microwave through a utility provider, the other simple dialup. It is frustrating to both of them. Many of my neighbors and those living with the surrounding suburbs of my Big City can get Charter cable broadband, but it is unreliable and there are frequent outages. This is why I opted for DSL years ago and continue to stay with it. We don't have Clearwire, Fios, or anything else available to compete, which is not unusual for many parts of the country.

So when broadband providers say that adoption rates are slow, or stalling, I have to wonder. Where we want broadband, it doesn't exist, What are they using to measure with? Are they even considering that people in rural areas or semi-rural areas might want/need broadband but because it's not available, there is nothing to "adopt?" I find the figures extremely suspect.

Another wrench in their monkeyed-up numbers could also be the availability of free wireless all over my metropolitan area. Being the home of Panera Bread, there are literally dozens of stores where you can get wireless. Because AT&T is the phone service provider in the St. Louis area, their wireless is available at virtually every McDonald's and Barnes and Noble for free. Most independent coffee shops offer free wireless, as do all of the libraries, college campuses (public and private), and some restaurants. Within five miles of my house there are at least a dozen places I can go to get free wireless with no time restrictions. I know that most of my student workers use our on-campus or other free wireless and have no service at home; this works well for them and certainly fits their budget.

But I know there are people in rural and semi-rural areas that would be happy to pay for broadband, if it were available. The prices are about the same as dialup, so cost is not really a factor. The fact is, it isn't available, so no amount of being willing or able to pay will make the broadband magically appear. I know from personal experience how frustrating this is.

I think this is just another excuse for broadband providers to use in order not to upgrade their infrastructure. I continue to be disappointed at their slow-as-molasses development in this area. If it can be done in Europe, it can be done here. If it can be done in India, for goodness' sake, it can be done here.

Where did all the amazing news come from a 4th of July show you will not want to miss plus the chance to win $400.00 in the month of July!!

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"This is not the first time Google has fought the disclosure of user information it had been stockpiling."

This is a quote from a CNN article I read this morning about the most recent ruling in the Viacom vs. Google lawsuit, in which Viacom is asking for $1 billion in damages from Google because some of their copyrighted content has appeared on YouTube (owned by Google). Viacom has won a preliminary ruling in which they asked Google to provide a complete listing of all videos, who viewed them, and how many times. Google claims this is about 12 TB of information and will take months to gather.

The quote caught my eye, because I can see where Google might have been able to get out of providing the required information, had they not been "stockpiling" it in the first place. A few years back, right after 9/11, the FBI showed up on the college campus where I work, looking for information on a particular user of one of our stations who had sent a threatening email to my state's governor. We did not have the information they requested, because we don't keep any kind of logs of our users. We don't record anything. They had the IP address of the computer in question, and we could tell them where that computer was (turns out it was in the student-use computer lab I manage), but that was pretty much all we could give them. They directed us to keep detailed records of who used what computer at what time, for at least 90 days.

You can imagine in a place of academic freedom this rankled quite a few people. The librarians were incensed. My boss and I were dismayed by the amount of work this would pile on us. Our college legal office attempted to nix the order on the grounds that it violated privacy. But in the end, we had to do as we were told; it was post-9/11, and everyone was on edge. Fortunately, after about a year of keeping the data as requested, our legal office had the order rescinded and we went back to our "don't ask, don't tell" ways and purged all information we had been keeping. If and when the FBI shows up again, we will have no records to show them.

But I'm sure Google has kept every tiny tidbit of information from day one. They have volumes and volumes of these records, which can easily be subpoenaed and used in any manner needed. Despite the fact that Viacom says it will not release the information or use it for anything other than the court case, I'm inclined to think that once the information is released by Google, it will be used in more than just the court case. If Google didn't keep the records to begin with, there would be nothing to be breached/released.

I'm sure they have their reasons for keeping the information, and that it has to do with making money. I hope it was worth it for them to do so. And how safe, now, is login information for YouTube? I, my husband, and my two teenagers all have YouTube accounts, and I and my daughter upload home video all the time. All of us watch videos on a pretty regular basis. I can't say whether we've watched anything that infringes or not, but I know I've watched videos of snippets of television shows or news reports, as well as home videos and self-made media.

Will Viacom take the further step of smacking everyone who has viewed infringed material once they've won their lawsuit against Google? After all, they will have the information on every user and what they've seen.

A pretty frightening thought, from my perspective.

Update: In part due to this blog post the OLPC finally responded and resolved the issue. On July 25th the OLPC replaced and delivered the two missing Laptops. I want to thank the help desk team member who took the initiative to make things right!

In early 2007 I ran a series of events that raised money for OLPC. We were successful in raising enough money for 5 OLPC laptops pairs to be purchased.

I ordered 2 units first, followed with 3 more several weeks later. During the long delivery time I was in the middle of a house move, I informed and received confirmation from the OLPC Admin that the first 2 units ordered had their shipping address updated.

But I found out in Dec 2007 that they actually shipped the first two units by fedex to the old address. The new residents of my old address denied receiving them. Conversations with Fedex driver guaranteed the OLPC Laptops had been left. Well I filed a Police Report, Filed a Fedex Claim and contacted OLPC.

Since that time I have received several email's from OLPC that said they have been working on it. My most recent communications with them have resulted in no response. I have asked OLPC to either refund the cash that was used to buy these units that came largely from donations or to replace the two stolen computers.

OLPC customer support is horrible and I feel that the OLPC organization cannot be trusted at this point. They have not worked in good faith to try and at least communicate with me on the issue even after multiple attempts to get them to move off of dead center.

The least the could do is tell me if the Properly Filed FedEx claim was paid or denied, they tell me they are not going to refund money or that they are not going or they are going to someday replace the laptops. All I want is a answer from someone over their.

The other 3 units that ordered at a later date were all received and have been shipped off to those that won one as part of the promotions we were having.

My wife hinted at the fact that she would like a iPhone. This encouraged me to consider getting two new iPhone’s on July 11th. But that conversation has quickly faded when we saw the plan pricing.

For over 7 years we have had our service with T-Mobile. We have there family plan with 2000 minutes a month and 4 phones on the service for a little less then what it would cost to have 1 iPhone on their unlimited plan.

I have issues with AT&T wireless but the price that their pricing for their service is completely non-competitive with the service I have now making the switch is not going to happen.

I predict that sales of the new iPhone will not be as brisk as they think they will be. Primarily because you are forced to be on AT&T, the economy is hurting and people are watching the dollars they are spending and beyond a speed increase the new features for consumers are not that great.

If Apple had replaced the crappy camera in the phone and made it possible to do video with the device that may have been enough to twist my arm to change. So now I am on the hunt for a new phone that will serve the niche I want to use it for.

But sorry AT&T an Apple your phone pricing discount is not enough for me to make the jump to the new phone because your plan pricing honestly really blows.

Is it just me? Or is everyone that flies on a regular basis, getting pretty sick and tired on how the airlines are nickel and diming us to death. I have flown nearly 70,000 miles since January 1st and it seems that nearly every flight I take things are getting more ridiculous.

I feel sorry for the Flight Attendants, once a glorious job they are now being forced by their employers to be candy and snack sales people. I have heard more sales pitches on flights lately that I expect them to start walking the isles with chickens legs and pork rinds for sale. Its truly pathetic what the airline attendants are being forced to endure.

Ohh and don’t even travel with luggage, because if you pack more than you can wear on your body you better get your credit card out and be prepared to pay up not to mention the scales Nazi. I think I will start putting rocks in my bags just to get them to exactly 49.99 pounds.

Meals well forget that, and even if your up in first class most meals just generally suck. When you fly from Hawaii on a regular basis the flights are at a minimum 4 hours long and usually more like 9. But yet most Airlines treat Hawaii flights as if they are domestic.

Little trivia for you, the closest land to Hawaii that is not a island is over a 1000 miles away. In fact Hawaii are the most remote islands in the world, yet we are considered a domestic flight by airlines in the types of services they provide, yet they charge International rates for the flights.

Do you think after I spent $1700.00 for a trip to New Mexico last week that I want to have to find food for the flight, and then have to pay for my bags to be checked. Would it not be easier to charge me $1800.00 for the ticket, where I can check my bags for free, get a meal during the flight and not have to worry about having change to pay for my $3.00 peanuts.

Give me a break. Flying is not glorious, Flying is Hell, and their is nothing we can do about it but scream about the stupidity of the airlines in how the are Nickel and Diming us yet their service goes down the toilet. Cattle Travel better than Airline Passengers at least they get fed.

I don’t care that the Airlines are in trouble, raise your fares to cover your expenses so that I have room in the overhead for my carry on instead of having to deal with some person bringing a “Carry On” the size of a Elephant trunk, and taking up the entire storage area above my seat.

Ohh and did you hear that we are all going to have to start stepping on scales when we get to the airport? Anyone that weighs more than 25 pounds will have to pay a 5 dollars a pound for the right to sit down in ones seat.

The July GNC Awareness campaign continues. Listen to Win during the Listener Drive! I also reveal what party RawVoice is sponsoring at the New Media Expo!

Please Support my Show Sponsors!:
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Listener Links:
MUTO Video you must Watch
Collision of Spam and Sushi
State of SLR Digital Market

Show Notes:
Geek News Central Top 25 Podcast in June
Bejing Pollution Solution
Will the Mac Faithful use Me.com?
Google Smacks Bell Canada Really Hard
Mexcio Food Import Ban
Managing Digg.com and the traffic Challenges
Yahoo lets Deal?
12 Quick Firefox Hacks
Don't let your small Town get smashed by Telecom Giants
Gmail Feature of the Year!!
Is Arecibo Doomed?
T-Mobile 3G Service in October?
SSD to lower World Wide Power Usage?
Is RIAA working with Dell and other PC Mfgrs?
IE / Office Zero Day Security Threat
Twitter buying Summize?
Take Kindle to Beach of Pool?
Getting Started with Movable Type
Ares 5 to have more Lift!
David Jackson on my Podcamp Ohio Presentation
In IRAN Blog and be Killed?
2009 Space Shuttle Schedule
Antivirus Applications full of Security Holes
Who's Safer Firefox or IE Users
Time Warner BW Marketing Campaign Idiots

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Today I deleted well over 100 custom searches I have been doing on Technorati for a very long time. Simple reason is this, the site is useless. I have given them every chance to scale and fix their issues.

After today their site is in my personal dead pool. It’s a sad state of affairs that they never could master indexing blog conversations. They did a great job for a while, so good in fact that I would have paid a monthly subscription to find information that was not available anyplace yet.

Search results have degraded to the point that about 90% of the stuff I look at is coming back with spam post. Articles referencing information I am tracking is  usually never indexed at all. So sad really they really had a chance to be the #1 source of tracking search specific conversations.

Since 2005 Godaddy.com has been the primary sponsor of the Geek News Central Podcast. They have understood the Podcast Advertising market from the very beginning and have committed 100’s of thousands of dollars into the Podcast Advertising Space.

While I was personally responsible for bringing GoDaddy into the Podcast Advertising Space, they quickly understood the power of the medium and now 100’s if not 1000’s of shows are sponsored by GoDaddy.

I want to thank the thousands of you that have purchased domain names, hosting accounts, virtual dedicated and dedicated servers with GoDaddy as a supporter of this website and my podcast.

As always you can find great products at a great price at GoDaddy and do not forget to use my non expiring promo codes. “Todd” will save you 10%, “Geek5” will save you 15% on orders $20.00 or more, “Comsale” gets you .com names at $6.95, “Aloha” will save you $20.00 on orders of $75.00 or more.

The best GoDaddy Promo Code for Shared Hosting accounts is “Todd20” this will save you 20% on, one year shared hosting accounts. I appreciate your support of GoDaddy and hope that you will continue to support my show and website through purchases at Godaddy.com

Blogger Louis Gray has been studying the referrals to his blog and has noticed that getting linked to by a large blog site or influential blogger doesn't drive the same level of traffic as it used to. The move in traffic generation has been to the aggregators like Techmeme, Reddit, Digg etc. There is also a large shift towards readers consuming content through RSS readers rather than always coming direct to the website.

Both these trends are understandable to an extent. The sheer volume of content and the large number of blogs that are out there make it very difficult for people to easily find interesting or relevant content without the aggregators. This is a catch 22 situation. There is too much content out there for a user to filter it without taking up way too much time. The aggregator sites help with this by doing a pre-filter for us. This leads to a bit of group think though, where we only see the articles that algorithm's have determined are the most important. RSS readers are also a way for us to deal with large amounts of information more easily

It is natural that a space that is as relatively new as blogging will evolve rapidly over time. The environment will continue to evolve as technologies grow and develop and as people throw ew ideas into the mix. I don't think anyone can argue that we have the whole community information thing down perfectly yet. We have never individually had access to more information as a species and we need to work out exactly how to best process it.

I do not believe that the final solution is going to be the aggregators. This is not really a model that gives us the best information. It is the method that is easiest for advertising though, and since that is the prime method for revenue in the space this gives those sites the power at the moment. I would imagine that the future will be in more human edited content rather than algorithm generated content. For this method to succeed though a way to generate revenue directly from the content consumption needs to exist as advertising revenue is not large enough or stable enough to fund this.

Advertising also has a corrupting influence on editorial content. This is not necessarily in a pernicious way, but a subtle influence that this has when advertising is the only method with which a company gets its revenue. The people that give you your revenue are your real customers. If all you have is advertising then your business is to deliver people to advertisers, not to deliver a service to your "consumer". Over time a couple of revenue generating models will emerge and then the game will change yet again.

Matthew's post just below this one got me thinking this morning. I don't use a news/RSS aggregator. I have tried one out once, but didn't like it much, because I thought I was missing out on some things. So I read my news, tech and otherwise, the old-fashioned way. I visit sites individually.

I know this sounds time-consuming, but I've done a few things to speed up the process. One is that I use Firefox and have the adblock plus add-on running, which turns off all advertising and leaves me with just the facts, ma'am. This leads to fewer distractions once I'm on a site. I also have pared down to where I really want to go, and go only there. Once in a site with multiple levels of information (like the New York Times or USAToday, I go only to those sections that I am going to get the information I'm looking for. The last thing I've done is turn into a really good headline reader. If the headline doesn't catch my eye, I pass it up. If the headline does catch my eye, but the first two sentences of the article don't follow through, then I pass it on for the next article. I also have figured out what tech sites are going to give me the best information without a bunch of duplication. I don't read Arstechnica anymore, or techmeme, because it is a rehash of what I get at Techdirt. I rarely read Techcrunch, because it is constantly talking about mergers and acquisitions of software and social sites and I'm not interested in either. I get good info from USAToday's tech section, believe it or not, and I am addicted to Engadget and Gizmodo. I avoid Digg like the plague, because too much of their content is focused on gaming and juvenile fanboy stuff that isn't my thing.

By being selective and using the tools at my disposal, I get through 5 newspapers and about ten tech news blogs/sites in about 45 minutes this way. It is not a huge amount of time and I consider it to be fairly productive. I spend a whole lot more time writing in my blogs and for here than I do reading the actual news.

I don't necessarily think that aggregators are the way to go for everyone. I have friends who use them, and I know Todd lives with his, but I have always felt that that "pared down" information was leaving something out for me. I have to wonder if aggregators will eventually go by the wayside through lack of usage. Of the 17 techs in my department at my J.O.B., only one of them uses an aggregator, and we all are heavy readers of tech news. That says something, I think.

You might not be sure of what DNS is and I could explain it to you (don't worry, I will), but let's just get to the meat and potatoes here. Some Major DNS servers will be getting patches applied to them that will fix some very important vulnerabilities.

OK. Technical jargon paragraph: DNS stands for Domain Name System. Basically, it takes the name of the website (like geeknewscentral.com) and points it to the host server on the internet. Think of it like a phone book - you open it up and reference a name with their phone number.

The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (or CERT for short) was informed of an issue where web sites could get misdirected through what is called "cache poisoning". Cache poisoning is like having a phone book where someone crossed out the phone number you want and put in their own.

Cache poisoning was not why Comcast was hacked 2 months prior. They suffered a "Pharming" scam, which is where the information is either changed on the computer trying to go to the site, or the host server (which is the case of Comcast). Poisoning happens on the DNS server itself.

The bug was luckily found by Dan Kaminsky, who is the director of penetration testing at IOActive Inc, a comprehensive Computer Security Services company. He basically found the bug by "Accident" and reported it in early 2008. Security researchers then convened at Microsofts' campus to plan a patch of this potentially dangerous issue.

Some companies were left in the dark until last month. They knew a problem existed but could only make some counter measures. This was so the research team could create a fail-safe fix and not make the issue known to those that could and would exploit the hole.

Even now, they will not give out all the details. We will finally get a full detail when all is said and done next month. What we do know is that the hole is related to the transaction ID in which each DNS entry has. The ID is a random number with 65 thousand possibilities and associated with the DNS entry in the database. If the two items do not match up, then DNS will not resolve the name.

Apparently, 65 thousand numbers is not random enough. It's like trying to break into a safe with a combination lock using a stethoscope. The new process will add "More randomness" with an added 16 bits of security.

Since this can affect the way you access sites (including secure sites), the application of these patches has to be done slowly and methodically. Can't just shut down the whole system at 2 AM. Any mix up and a large group of people won't be able to get to their part of the internet.

Where this gets even more hairy is the fact that Servers have to be aware of some of the changes so they can reroute and adjust their firewalls and DMZ. Most servers will have to update to BIND9 (Berkley Internet Name Domain). A large number are still on version 8. Yahoo, for example, will be updating it's infrastructure.

I think we avoided a possibly major issue here. Think what would have happened if someone found out about this hole. They could easily have re-routed you to a site that could have phished out and stole important data. You wouldn't have known until it's too late. Let's hope the fix is done as quick as possible and that it holds well.

Of course you’re going to the New Media Expo in Vegas! Heck yeah! Guess what else? My team at RawVoice wants you to be our guest at the Coverville 500!

This totally fab event features rad cover artist Richard Cheese with Lounge Against the Machine, Jonathan Coulton, Chance, the Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd, Natalie Gelman and is hosted by The Bitterest Pill’s Dan Klass.

Not only that, to make sure we get you in the right mood, we’re chipping in for your drinks, too! So smile, say “cheese” and keep checking back here as an, official sponsor of the Coverville 500, to find out how you, our favorite peeps, can catch up with us 7 p.m. Aug. 15 at the Bally’s Hotel and Casino on the strip.

In the next several days I take delivery of a TriCaster Broadcast. I have a lot of of plans for the unit, but over the next couple of weeks I need to pick a permanent video streaming service.

The plans I have for the 2008 People’s Choice Podcast Awards makes Mogulus the best choice so far, as I will be having 22 shows join us live for the awards ceremony plus all of the in house production. Mogulus allows you to use a flash encoder to feed their video feed which is a perfect solution.

I am sure that I am going to have to pick up some more hardware to support all of this, and probably some more power plugs and definitely another cable modem as bandwidth is already pretty tapped out here and I have 3 HD Cameras to start with.

Being Hawaii is in the center of the Universe, I am sure I am going to have to order cables off island as well, so it will probably be a week or more before I am ready to do some live events.

If you are in Hawaii and would like to rent a TriCaster and the gear that goes along with it. I will have a traveling kit ready in a few weeks.

A Very Special Tech Podcasts Round Table
Saturday July 12th
4pm Eastern 1pm Pacific

The team at TechPodcasts.com are going to have a very special Tech Podcast Round Table. They will be introducing the new version of GotoMeeting, plus they have 2 terrific speakers.

The Presenters will be:

• John Coonen, the head of the Joomla Chicago Users Group, and founder of the JoomlaExpo trade shows will be a guest to talk about Joomla


• Dan Gebhardt Lead Developer for LiveTimer.com will be talking about a great product and productivity tool at LiveTimer.com.


• Todd Cochrane (me) will be presenting the new features of GotoMeeting version 4.0

GotoMeeting will load automatically and then you can then choose to either dial in, or participate with a headset via VOIP. Mac users will want to tune in as well because my demo of GotoMetting will be done with a Mac. GotoMeeting Version 4 has 100% Mac Support as well as PC Support.

GotoMeeting is the official sponsor of the Tech Podcasts Round Table you can get a free no credit card required trial at www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts

Listen to the show to find out some of the cool stuff RawVoice is launching. I will have formal announcements over the next few days and into next week. Also Tricaster Broadcast is on the way!

Link to Full Show Notes Click Here

Please Support my Show Sponsors!:
[Save 10% off on any order at GoDaddy.com!] Use Code Todd
[Try GoToMeeting free for 30 days at GoToMeeting.com/techpodcasts. No credit card needed.]

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The NY Times is reporting that the FCC has found that Comcast's aggresive blocking of BitTorrent traffic has violated the FCC's open access rules. What the penalty will be will not be known until August once the full board has met.

This ruling sets a fantastic precedent, while every ISP shapes traffic to some extent if they are too aggresive or indiscreet with their actions the FCC will step up and penalise them. Comcast is of course not saying they will stop packet shaping altogether but rather that they will instead experiment with other packet shaping techniques.

This ruling does not ban any packet shaping of Internet traffic, in fact it acknowledges that traffic shaping is a valid action for ISPs to take. What it means is that ISPs must detail the techniques they use. ISPs must also show that the shaping is designed to improve traffic flow without targetting any specific group, sites or protocols. Good news on balance I would say.

Seems the in store activation has blown up in AT&T face. Believe me this in store activation fiasco was a result of AT&T getting hammered in the first iPhone release when people like me put T-Mobile sims in the phone after unlocking them ourselves. Glitch